Dear New Customer,

[reynardo.livejournal.com]

When your technician is trying to make sure your service is up, including your phone line, and your cable modem, he needs to ring Head Office Installations to make sure all the signals are coming through. Without doing that, he can't ensure your system is working, especially the phone line.

I therefore am finding it hard to believe that you want me to reimburse you for the three local phone calls he made, which will have cost a total of about 60 cents.

Dear $user

[goose-entity.livejournal.com]

By all means, after I have told you that I know nothing about $MAINRAME_APP$ because I am a desktop / network support dude, PLEASE continue to WITTER at me for 5 minutes about how you can't do any work without the $MAINFRAME_APP$ that I DO NOT SUPPORT, even though I have told you the number to call because, you know, phoning the number of the team that supports $MAINFRAME_APP$ is much harder than spending 5 minutes WITTERING ON TO ME about an app THAT I DO NOT SUPPORT AND CANNOT HELP YOU WITH.

Moron.


*seethes*

(no subject)

[the-paco.livejournal.com]

I wish my techs wouldn't become proxies for the customer when calling into me.

Dear techs:

Look people, I've been there fairly recently. I've talked to the customers. I know Billing has been borking them over. I know other, more moronic techs have been borking them over. I know they're at the end of their rope trying to get what should be a simple request pushed through a mash of incomprehensible red tape, and you want to help. I'm GLAD you do. I want to help too.

But that doesn't mean you can call me up and whine to me about how bad off the customer has it. The customers ALWAYS have it bad. That's why they're calling in. Don't call into me replaying their tale of woe. I don't care if they can't get work done. I don't care if they REALLY need it. I don't care if they'll sue our pants off. It's a residential account for entertainment purposes only. While it may suck dog balls that they're down, they'll hardly die without it, and if they do, that will teach their next of kin how to read service agreements. Bugging me with stupid worthless details about their lives in the glorious days of working DSL before the Dark Internet Light Times won't help them.

When I tell you how to fix it, and it's something other than "We can fix that in this department", don't get snippy. I'm telling you how to fix it effectively. Just because you have the underappreciated position of having to deal with a customer whose going to scream at you a bit doesn't mean you can whine or argue to me. I don't care about percieved convenience. I'm here to fix the issue. Also note: just because the customer is more charismatic than a sweet potato doesn't mean you suddenly start working for them and start getting indignant on their behalf. You work for us, specifically, under my team. When I tell you how it is, that's how it is. That doesn't mean you bug me with the same question worded 30 different ways or whine useless crap about how 'this never happened before' or the like. I answered your question, I told you what to do. It may not be the easiest row to hoe, but it's the one that will get the customer working.

I, unlike you, dear tech, do not shirk my work. I know my boundries, and I know how not to become involved in every half-assed sob story or fall into the thrall of every 'network engineer' who 'knows how this works'. I know what I'm doing, hence the reason I'm where I am, and why I'm going upwards. You asked a question, I answered a question. Don't expect me to pull magic "make the blinky light go green" dust out of my leather cheerio just because you don't feel like accepting the truth.

Now go do your damn job.

Lots of Love (and by love I do mean Hatred that burns like a raging STD in full swing),
Paco

Waaaaaah!

[gilmoure.livejournal.com]

Raging Caller (RC):"Why did you send me an email at 7:14PM last night, telling me my accounts were due to expire in 30 days? I went out to the link on the email and clicked submit, to renew them, but it sent the request to my manager. He's out today and won't be back until Monday! What am I supposed to do if my accounts expire? And why did you send it out last night?!!!"

Pleasent Morning Voice (me): All customers are alerted 30 days prior to accounts expiring. Your manager is listed as the one to approve your accounts. If he's not available, you can ask his manager or see if his Office Assistant is delegated to approve items in his workbox.

RC: "I have to go to all that trouble? Just reset them!"

me: I can't do that. I don't have the authority. You do have 30 days so it's not likely they'll expire before they're approved.

RC: "Well, what are you going to do if they do expire? I have work to do today!"

me: blink-blink...Your accounts are still active-

RC: (cutting me off) If I can't get my work done today, you'll hear about it. Click!

Filled in ticket, sent copy to my boss and her manager, suggesting that customer should be scheduled for another go through of Work Place Violence, and Computer Security Procedures. Each course is 2 hours of pure boredom. I hate my customers. I receive high marks on professionalism and helpfulness.

Wonderful.

[toxico.livejournal.com]

This crazy bitch is calling back. Her singlehanded fuckery of this team's opinion of the human race is now legendary here.

She's been told by managers in North America not to call the support line. But, the call center in Bangalore has apparently been supporting her.

Dear Bangalore call center: STOP IT, YOU ASSHATS.

[edit - Manager to woman: "[name withheld], if you keep calling me a stupid mother fucker, that doesn't make me want to help you."]

[edit the 2nd - caller ID usually identifies her phone number. Now it reads "AT&T LOCAL." Not necessarily an indicator of anything - could just be the call routing - but we wonder if she's travelling north...]

(no subject)

[fearrett.livejournal.com]

So, today I had the most wonderful time today. Now, first a bit of background.

1: In DOC, we do NOT make outbound calls. EVER.
2: All cases must use the internal KB at SOME point in time.

So this is the ticket I pulled up today:

Problem: DOC - Customer is recieving an error.
Troubleshooting: *.* (No bullshit, just that)
Solution: Transferred customer.

Apparently this guy, who's last name was rather.... italian, and who sounded like a wise guy, and probably had a few cousins who could be used to hurt me had been promised a callback in 45 minutes. The fastest our outbound team at work has ever done an outbound since I started was summat like 2 hours.

This call caused me physical injury.

(Edit) apparently he'd been told by a previous tech that he was going to be called back in 45 minutes after a chkdsk was run.

*pencil in eye*

[azzy23.livejournal.com]

Hi. This is my first post, but I just had to share the joy.

There's this incredibly tedious process for escalating cases at my work. The ostensible purpose is to make sure ALL information needed has been gathered, thereby freeing the upper level types to merely stare at the information, allow their massive brains to pulse a few times, then spit out a brilliant solution. I know what you're thinking, but strangely, the above scenario does actually happen sometimes...( Read more... )